Thoughts before starting my PPE degree

This was written in September 2020

 

It is three days before I start my degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, a degree pioneered by Oxford University in 1920 to replace the classics and instead offer a more modern and up to date version to provide the knowledge and skills for future civil servants to effectively govern. In the a year and a half that I've thought about pursuing this degree and in the eight months since being accepted I've had a lot of time to reflect upon the nature, the purpose, the scope, the benefits, the limitations about pursuing such a degree as it really is an outlier in terms of what the traditional university degree is supposed to accomplish. 

I personally am against specialization, the idea of 'specializing' in a particular subject makes me shiver with dread, I don't think there is anything more unpleasant to my intellectual drive than the idea of tunnel visioning in a narrow and isolated subject. To me it seems that a true understanding of mankind, as an individual and as a member of a community can only be analyzed in a holistic manner, to ask questions of a particular nature and to exclude all the other interconnections from it is to essentially take away the life away from it. It would be along the lines of trying to study what 'Man' is and only focus on his nervous system, or from a literary perspective, what we get when we ask the big questions in life such as, what is Man? what is the ideal human? what is the ideal society? How can humans become more 'free'? these questions, when one takes a long time reflecting upon them, realizes that they cannot be answered through an insect mentality, a derogatory way of saying specialization. A big problem we are facing now as a species in regards to the vast amount of information we have been producing since the literally the Ancient Greeks and probably even further back since Abrahamic theology is that we have no way of synthesizing this knowledge, its as if we think that by further and further analyzing more and more specific parts of mankind we will somehow magically comprehend how all the puzzle pieces fit together and then understand why the world is the way it is and not the way it ought to be. I guess i am indebted to Ernest Becker in terms of really showing me what a holistic science of man looks like, how eloquently he synthesized anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychiatry, biology and theology although in need of an update, and even if what he said was wrong, what he attempted to achieve was a herculean task and astonishing that he was able to achieve such an academic output in the 15 years he was working on a science of man. My desire for interdisciplinary knowledge although refined and truly shown by Becker probably has roots in the Biblical Series I watched of Jordan Peterson where he tried synthesizing psychiatry, philosophy and Christian theology. The point I'm trying to drive is that after having been presented to what a interdisciplinary science of man looks like, and then spending months researching, studying, and learning on my own I am infatuated with a complete and holistic understanding of man that I believe would only be hindered if I decided to study a degree that specialized in one subject. 

 

Now on to some possible questions regarding what I am trying to achieve with my higher education and what it actually offers, in the first place what I am really trying to do, what my overarching intellectual pursuit consists of, in which university is merely a part of, is I guess a holistic, a unified, a complete , a synthetic understanding of mankind, of what he is capable of, and why is he hindered from achieving it as a free individual and as a member of a collective. A true classical education is what I want. Is a PPE degree the solution to my intellectual and philosophical pursuits, yes and no, yes in the sense that it is but a small part of a overarching whole, and no in the sense that for me to think that a PPE degree will provide me with the depth and breadth I am really trying to achieve is hilarious, there is no way that it will be able to provide me with all of what I want to learn, and this is not a criticism of the degree rather it is just pointing out that what I desire intellectually and philosophically, no degree will be able to satisfy, you would need a degree that had all the letters of the alphabet and I would probably have to spend twenty years doing it. It is just not possible, that is not say that the degree will not provide very valuable pillars of knowledge that is relevant to what I'm doing. 

So tackling the criticism that PPE in the sense that it is too narrow for what it wants to achieve (I want to achieve) which is a synthetic understanding of Man: anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, history, philosophy, economics, politics, literature, theology, the occult, etc. I answered it by saying that it is a ludicrous and impossible task for University to accomplish, this is not something one can achieve in four years of study but throughout a life of intellectual pursuits. 

Tackling the next criticism that PPE is too broad and general for what it actually does which is to learn about philosophy, politics and economics I will agree with this criticism but I reject its reasoning and how it approaches this weak spot of the PPE. I would like to first start by dividing knowledge one acquires into two types: structural and nodal (from the word nodes), the difference between these two types of knowledge is that structural knowledge is the things you learn and how it relates to an overarching whole, how they all relate together and which serves as a foundational block which then can be built on with more complex knowledge, so its the typical example of learning basic arithmetic, fractions, etc in math before learning equations, and then derivates and integrals, you know what I'm talking about. Nodal knowledge on the other hand is generally what happens when people, such as myself, attempt to learn complex subjects by ourselves, what ends up happening a lot of times is that you end up knowing lots of separate but isolated nodes of knowledge but you don't really know how it relates to other parts of the same subject so you can't use what you learned as the foundational structure for more complicated ideas and what ends up happening is that without this foundational structure you end forgetting what you learnt because you have no way of integrating it into an overarching structure of knowledge. So how does this relate to PPE and other degrees, so what I expect is that degrees in which you specialize in a particular subject say economics is that you go through the process of learning the foundational structure and throughout the three or four years you build on that foundation higher and higher to more complex ideas which requires previous foundational knowledge. Okay so what does the PPE do? so what a person could say is that: "PPE doesn't go into depth and so its just better to study by yourself" but that would be fatally missing the difference between learning structural knowledge and nodal knowledge, ideally what would happen in a PPE degree is that it would provide foundational knowledge for all three subjects, throughout the three or four years of the degree you would build upon that foundation but not as much as a specific degree into one subject and that is perfectly expected, but what is also expected is that the people who pursue the PPE have a strong drive for intellectual pursuits in which they can use the foundation laid down by degree and through self-study and investigation build upon those foundations. While this can also be accomplished studying the subject by yourself I go back to the point of nodal vs structural knowledge that yes while it is possible to learn a subject by yourself it is really difficult to get that foundation and requires a ton of personal discipline and motivation.